The new controls included “See First”, which lets users choose people they want to hear from more, who will then be automatically pushed to the top of the feed. They also include tools to help people find new pages to follow and easy ways of unfollowing people and groups that aren’t interesting.

The new tools have appeared already in an update to the iOS app, and “will be rolling out on Android and desktop over the coming weeks”, Facebook said. To get the extra preferences, users can head to the “More” button in the bottom right hand corner of the app and select them through Settings.

Much of what Facebook chooses to show in the News Feed is done automatically, based on a combination of who users interact with, and what content they like, read and comment on. But the preferences are aimed at giving people some control over that process, letting them have extra input into who they want to hear from and don’t.

10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook

10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook

1/10

Around 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, with the site estimating in September last year that users had so far put up more than 250 billion images. That’s 4,000 photos uploaded every second and around 4 per cent of all photos ever taken, according to a study by Nokia.

REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

2/10

Facebook’s logo is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colour blind. “Blue is the richest color for me. I can see all of blue," said Zuckerberg in an interview with the New Yorker. The colour is so popular that Facebook’s campus store even sells nail polish in the exact shade named ‘social butterfly blue’.

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

3/10

Zuckerberg's famously low-key wardrobe (either a grey t-shirt or a hoodie) is so that the CEO saves time deciding what to wear each day. However, Zuckerberg is known to dress up when the occasion demands it. For a 2011 event with Barack Obama he showed up in a suit, with the president introducing himself by saying: “I’m Barack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.”

REUTERS/Brian Snyder

4/10

In July 2006 Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer for the site from Yahoo. He was 22 years old at the time and owned 25 per cent of the company. Zuckerberg reportedly turned it down by saying “I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have.” He definitely made the right choice: Facebook is now valued at $135 billion.

5/10

A YouGov poll claimed that three-quarter of UK Facebook users' photos showed someone drinking or inebriated. However, the poll did ask users to estimate the number of boozy snaps themselves, and like all things on Facebook, there might have been an element of exaggeration involved.

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

6/10

Facebook operates a bounty hunter program – for bugs. Like many other big technology companies Facebook offers cash rewards to security researchers who point out flaws in the site’s code. The minimum payout is $500 and the largest prize to date has been $33,500.

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

7/10

More than a third of divorce filings in 2011 referenced Facebook, said a survey from UK-based legal firm Divorce Online. The exact figures may be an estimate, but with just under 8 trillion Facebook messages sent in 2013 it’s certain that a substantial body of evidence is to be found on the social network.

8/10

Zuckerberg isn’t much of a Twitter fan. Despite having nearly three hundred thousand followers on the service he’s only tweeted 19 times - once in 2012 and the rest in 2009. Although Facebook dwarfs twitter in terms of active users (1 billion compared with 200 million by some accounts) the micro-blogging site handles breaking news better. Facebook has introduced trending topics and hashtags to counter this.

9/10

Following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 Iceland decided to rewrite their constitution using Facebook to solicit suggestions from citizens. Unfortunately, despite this forward thinking approach, the document was killed by politicians in mid-2013 for various (mostly technical) reasons.

10/10

You can browse Facebook upside down. Facebook currently supports more than 70 different languages – including English (Pirate) and English (Upside Down). Check the bottom of the column on the right of your newsfeed and click your current language to change!

In "see first", users will choose any pages or profiles that they’re most interested in from a list. Any posts they’ve made since users last visited the site will then show up at the top, with a little star showing how they got there.

An opposite tool allows people to follow or unfollow more easily, allowing them to be hidden from the feed but not unfriended. The tools will show a list of the people who have shown up most in the News Feed, and users can tick any that they’re not interested in.